Product Description

From Amazon

Few authors dare to truly analyze the complex natures of mother-daughter relationships. In her novel Summer Island, author Kristin Hannah perfectly captures the bittersweet, inspiring, disappointing, tragic, and human aspects of such a relationship. Set in the tranquil, present-day San Juan Islands, Summer Island presents itself as a deep investigation of the ramifications of a mother's abandonment of her two daughters. Unlike many similar novels, this one delivers the goods.

When Nora Bridge left her husband and her two daughters 10 years ago, she took the only route she could see, and assumed she still had her daughters' love. Now, though she is distant from her own daughters, Nora is the hostess of a radio advice show, where she advises listeners that "family comes first." When a scandal breaks and Nora hits rock bottom, she finds she has to rely on the two people she has betrayed most deeply: her daughters, Ruby and Caroline.

As an aspiring and failing comedian, Ruby's life in Los Angeles has shrunk into a directionless morass. She says when she dismisses superstition, "As if she needed magic to tell her that she was stuck in the spin cycle of her life." Though neither she nor Caroline are inclined to help their mother, Ruby finally agrees when a magazine offers to pay her for a tell-all exposé.

With a masterful balance of cutting wit, realistic dialogue, and lyrical description, Summer Island is by far Hannah's greatest work. Mothers, daughters, and sisters are sure to mark the passages and lend this novel to each other. If this is the standard for future Hannah novels, her fan base is sure to grow.--Nancy R.E. O'Brien

From Publishers Weekly

Second-chance love of a different stripe--between mother and daughter--is the focus of Hannah's (Angel Falls) overheated family drama. More than 10 years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her husband and two daughters. Now a wildly popular radio talk-show host and syndicated columnist, Nora offers inspirational advice that appeals to listeners' family values. What Nora's fans don't know is that her youngest daughter, Ruby, now 28, hasn't spoken to her mother in years. When a scandal breaks concerning Nora's unsavory past, Ruby, whose stand-up comedy career hasn't taken off the way she hoped it would, is hired to pen a tell-all article. Conveniently for Ruby, Nora is injured in a car accident and needs someone to accompany her to the family's former retreat on Washington's Summer Island. Once mother and daughter begin to get reacquainted, however, trading secrets, learning to see each other as people and healing the wounds of the past, Ruby isn't sure she wants to write the profile after all. Two subplots drive home the same lesson: one featuring Ruby and Dean, the young man Ruby pushed away while she was too busy hating her mother, and another involving Dean and his gay brother, Eric, now dying of cancer--conveniently, Dean and Eric are staying on a neighboring island, trying to get reacquainted. In all cases, Hannah's prescription for saving shaky relationships is the same: talk and forgiveness. The cozy sentimentality may appeal to fans of confessional talk shows--others will want to give Hannah's latest a miss. (Mar.)Forecast: Crown is backing Summer Island with a first printing of 125,000, advertising in major national publications and a teaser excerpt in Ballantine's mass market edition of Angel Falls, due out this month, but it's unlikely that this by-the-numbers offering will expand the author's reader base.

Nora Bridge has struggled to become the successful advice columnist and radio talk show host that she is. She particularly enjoys the legions of fans who hang on to her every word, and call in to ask deeply personal questions, relying on her moralistic and often harshly accurate advice. But the world she's built soon comes crashing down, when a man Nora had an affair with years ago surfaces, baring nude pictures of her in his arms. And when her fans find out that she was still married to her ex-husband at the time the pictures were taken, they're ready to turn against her. After all, how could they continue to take marital advice from a woman who is so clearly a hypocrite?As Nora sees her career coming to an end she hits rock bottom, believing that the past has finally caught up to her, and she's now lost everything. Eleven years ago, when her marriage ended, she left behind two young daughters who were distraught and betrayed by her actions. Even after all these years, Nora still has an estranged relationship with them both. Ruby, the younger daughter, has proven to be especially difficult, refusing to speak to Nora for over a decade and struggling to make a career as a stand-up comedian out of her resentment for her mother.When an accident brings Nora and her daughters back to the place that holds so many memories for all of them, the barriers they've built around them come crashing down. But can a few days in a home filled with old memories be enough to erase so many years of deep resentment?Kristin Hannah's strength as a writer shines through her characterization. Nora is extremely believable as a guilt-ridden mother yearning to make up for the mistakes she made in her past. Ruby is equally endearing as the betrayed daughter who harbors a lot of resentment for Nora. They come together in scenes charged with emotional energy in order to work through their feelings and start the healing process.SUMMER ISLAND is a novel about forgiveness and redemption and the choices we make. It's also a book that raises some interesting questions: How well do we really know our parents? And when we lose one of them, do we lose a part of ourselves as well? Among the exploration of the mother-daughter relationship lies another story of familial heartbreak along with a deeply moving portrayal of a young man on his deathbed. All these themes necessitate a full box of tissues nearby - SUMMER ISLAND is a definite tearjerker, and a must read for fans of passionate and dramatic family sagas.Read more ›

"Summer Island," although it has its good points, is a deeply flawed effort from Kristin Hannah.Let me explain. First, it's a very good story about a mother and daughter bonding after ten years of broken communication. I bought into that part.But it's the externals that were a problem for me. Nora Bridge is a radio talk show host, something like Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and talks a lot about family values. Her radio listeners know she's divorced, and has two grown daughters.Thing is, they're about to find out that, when she was younger (and still married), she had some semi-nude photos taken of her. This act of rebellion shows up to bite her years later, and she flees from reporters trying to make their names on the scandal.Ruby Bridge is a disillusioned, highly immature woman of 27. She's been most recently a waitress, but thinks of herself as an out of work comedienne. She's a good writer, but not so good at delivering the goods as a comic. But then, she gets two big breaks; a shot on TV (a show like "Politically Incorrect") as a comic and sitting on a panel, then gets a chance to write a tell-all about her mother from a major magazine (something like "The New Yorker"). She takes it, as she just lost her job at the restaurant, and really, she hates her mother anyway.Thing is, she goes to take care of her mother after her mother has a car accident (drinking and driving, no less), and breaks her leg. They go back to the ancestral home (not sure why they still have it; Ms. Hannah did account for it in her book, but I can't remember why just now) on one of the islands off the coast of Washington state; this is designed to keep Nora out of the public eye while she starts to heal.Thing is, Ruby's exposé must be delivered soon, and yet she finds out more and more about her mother. Things she had never expected. Things she really should have known, but thrust away (her father was an alcoholic, and cheated on her mother).Really, it's the more "minor" characters that carried this book in my opinion. First, the dying Eric was a great character; he knew what life was like, had lived it to the fullest, and wasn't afraid of dying (despite the fact that he was under 30). This was realistic; I've been around people with a terminal disease before, and it doesn't matter how old they are chronologically. All of them want to be released from their body, because it hurts.Second, the other sister, Caroline, is a much better person than Ruby. She, too, has a deeply troubled life; her husband cheats on her, and she's extremely unhappy. She tries to hold it together by being overly obsessive about her appearance and how she raises her kids, but it's obvious from the first time she shows up in the novel that she's very, very hurt.Ruby's romance with Eric's brother Dean is forgettable; a few decent sex scenes, then they decide to marry. Why? Because Ms. Hannah needed some romance, I guess; wish she would have found someone to throw at Nora Bridge, who deserved it far more than Ruby.And Caroline's life stinks, too. Nora tells Caroline to go back to her husband in not so many words, despite him being a womanizer and a liar. This makes no sense; telling her to try to work it out _while separated_ would have made more sense, as Caroline's husband needed a whole lot of counseling and consciousness raising before he'd change. This part took half a star away from the rating, because it was not realistic at all in my opinion.The second thing that took a star away was this. Look, I'm a writer; I know how long it takes to write opinions, current events articles, and longer factual pieces, as well as novels.To be blunt, Ms. Hannah's characterization of getting a magazine piece, writing it _while researching is in process_, and delivering it in only ten days, was completely unbelievable. It does not fly; there is no way it could be done.No way in the world.Also, I have a hard time buying the fact that Ruby would get big bucks to do the exposé in the first place. I can believe _little_ bucks, but big bucks? From a first-time author? From someone who's known to hate her mother? Not particularly believable, in my opinion.Finally, the last thing that took a star away was this. There was a very strange and offputting flash-forward section towards the end of the book. In this flash-forward, Ruby talks about "ten years of affluence" (when she's always been broke -- one reason she took the money for the tell-all exposé is because of the amount of problems she'd had paying her bills), and her dying friend Eric is _still living_, ten years down the road. However, without further ado, after about a page and a half of this confusing nonsense, we're back to present day, where Eric is still dying of end-stage cancer (and he _does_ die, even further confusing the issue), Ruby's still broke, and she's wondering if she'll ever marry Dean after all.This made absolutely no sense, and although it may not be Ms. Hannah's fault (the editors or typesetters could have screwed this up somehow), it was something that totally distracted me from an otherwise engaging read. Plus, it got my hopes up that Eric, who I liked more than any other character in the book, was going to live after all through a miracle. Instead, he dies, and Ruby marries Dean -- something that is a total anticlimax from my standpoint, as Ruby and Dean aren't anywhere near as good of people as Eric was.Because of these flaws, although I agree with the Amazon main review that says "Summer Island" is a great read for mothers and daughters, I believe it is too problematical to recommend.If you want to read Ms. Hannah's work, go read "When Lightning Strikes," which is much better than this. I feel this is a worthy, but extremely flawed, book. Therefore, I'm giving it 2.5 stars on the head -- and I'll let you make up your own mind.Read more ›

If I could ignore contrivance, unrealistic plots, and stupid dialogue, this would have gotten 5 stars from me. It is a great book to sit and read on the beach. But since I nit-pick every little detail in books, I have to tell you that this book will probably never be opened again.First, where to start. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I'm trying to picture all of America caring if Dr. Phil or the late Ann Landers had some dirt dug up on them about an affair from years earlier. I have a hard time imagining anyone caring. And if people did, I have a hard time imagining it ruining a career like it did for main character Nora Bridge. But somehow, she goes from being some huge celebrity to someone who has to hide out from the press. Because there is no celebrity gossip better than some B list radio show host who did something naughty. Anyhow, I digress. It is stupid, but it is integral to the entire book.I really liked the daughter Ruby at the beginning. She reminds me of a couple people I know, how they had made some bad choices, and their lives hadn't turned out the way they had wanted. But I was disliking the evolution the character took by the end of the book. Healing 11 years of anger and resentment with her mother was so nice to read, and made the story enjoyable. But it happened within a period of a couple of days. It seemed so unrealistic to me, but it was well-written and enjoyable. I wish the same could be said with her so called relationship with Dean. Ruby is reunited with Dean, who she hadn't seen for 10 years, when they were TEENAGERS, they basically have a couple of really short, shallow, unrevealing conversations, and end up declaring their love for each, having sex on the spot, then a post-coital decision to get married. Nothing was written about either of these two characters seems to suggest that they would impulse and get married to someone who they hadn't seen since childhood just because they happened to have good sex. It was a very weak part of the story and should have been thought through more.Finally, I have to be critical of one last point. The author describes a sailboat in terrible disrepair, and then Dean decides that his project is to restore it. Which he does in a matter of a day or two. Seriously. Why throw [stuff] in the story that is totally unrealistic? The boat she described would not have been a job for Dean to say, "Hmm, let's do this for an afternoon". It just bugs me. It was unneccesary to the story and unrealistic, which are two things I hate when I am trying to read a stupid beach novel to take my mind off of things for awhile.Read more ›